Алистер Маклин - Floodgate

Van Effen turned to de Graaf. ‘Would you like to see the boats, sir?’

‘Do you think we’ll find anything?’

‘No. Well, might find out what they’ve been doing. I’ll bet they haven’t left one clue for hardworking policemen to find.’

‘Might as well waste some more time.’

The brothers-in-law went in their own car, the two policemen in van Effen’s, an ancient and battered Peugeot with a far from ancient engine. It bore no police distinguishing marks whatsoever and even the radio telephone was concealed. De Graaf lowered himself gingerly into the creaking and virtually springless seat.

‘I refrain from groaning and complaining, Peter. I know there must be a couple of hundred similar wrecks rattling about the streets of Amsterdam and I appreciate your passion for anonymity, but would it kill you to replace or re-upholster the passenger seat?’

‘I thought it lent a nice touch of authenticity. But it shall be done. Pick up anything back in the house there?’

‘Nothing that you didn’t. Interesting that the tall thin man should be accompanied by a couple of mutes. It has occurred to you that if the leader, as Dekker calls him, is a foreigner then his henchmen are also probably foreigners and may very well be unable to speak a word of Dutch?’

‘It had occurred and it is possible. Dekker said that the leader gave orders which would give one to understand that they spoke, or at least understood, Dutch. Doesn’t necessarily follow, of course. The orders may have been meaningless and given only to convince the listener that the others were Dutch. Pity that Dekker has never ventured beyond the frontiers of his own homeland. He might – I say just might – have been able to identify the country of origin of the owner of that voice. I speak two or three languages, Peter, you even more. Do you think, if we’d heard this person speaking, we’d have been able to tell his country?’

‘There’s a chance. I wouldn’t put it higher than that. I know what you’re thinking, sir. The tape-recording that this newspaper sub-editor made of the phone call they received. Chances there would be much poorer – you know how a phone call can distort a voice. And they don’t strike me as people who would make such a fairly obvious mistake. Besides, even if we did succeed in guessing at the country of origin, how the hell would that help us in tracking them down?’

De Graaf lit up a very black cheroot. Van Effen wound down his window. De Graaf paid no attention. He said: ‘You’re a great comforter. Give us a few more facts – or let’s dig up a few more – and it might be of great help to us. Apart from the fact, not yet established, that he may be a foreigner, all we know about this lad is that he’s very tall, built along the lines of an emaciated garden rake and has something wrong with his eyes.’

‘Wrong? The eyes, I mean, sir? All we know for certain is that he wears sun-glasses at night-time. Could mean anything or nothing. Could be a fad. Maybe he fancies himself in them. Maybe, as Dekker suggested, he thinks sun-glasses are de rigueur for the better class villain. Maybe, like the American President’s Secret Service body-guards, he wears them because any potential malefactor in a crowd can never know whether the agent’s eyes are fixed on him or not, thereby inhibiting him from action. Or he might be just suffering from nyctalopia.’

‘I see. Nyctalopia. Every schoolboy knows, of course. I am sure, Peter, that you will enlighten me at your leisure.’

‘Funny old word to describe a funny old condition. I am told it’s the only English language word with two precisely opposite meanings. On the one hand, it means night-blindness, the recurrent loss of vision after sunset, the causes of which are only vaguely understood. On the other hand, it can be taken to mean day-blindness, the inability to see clearly except by night, and here the causes are equally obscure. A rare disease, whatever meaning you take, but its existence has been well attested to. The sun-glasses, as we think of them, may well be fitted with special correctional lenses.’

‘It would appear to me that a criminal suffering from either manifestation of this disease would be labouring under a severe occupational handicap. Both a house-breaker, who operates by daylight, and a burglar, who operates by night, would be a bit restricted in their movements if they were afflicted, respectively, by day or night blindness. Just a little bit too far-fetched for me, Peter. I prefer the old-fashioned reasons. Badly scarred about the eyes. Cross-eyed. Maybe he’s got a squint. Maybe an eye whose iris is streaked or particoloured. Maybe wall-eyed, where the iris is so light that you can hardly distinguish it from the white or where the pupils are of two different colours. Maybe a sufferer from exophthalmic goitre, which results in very protuberant eyes. Maybe he’s only got one eye. In any event, I’d guess he’s suffering from some physical abnormality by which he would be immediately identifiable without the help of those dark glasses.’

‘So now all we’ve got to do is to ask Interpol for a list, world-wide, of all known criminals with eye defects. There must be tens of thousands of them. Even if there were only ten on the list, it still wouldn’t help us worth a damn. Chances are good, of course, that he hasn’t even got a criminal record.’ Van Effen pondered briefly. ‘Or maybe they could give us a list of all albino criminals on their books. They need glasses to hide their eyes.’

‘The Lieutenant is pleased to be facetious,’ de Graaf said morosely. He puffed on his cheroot, then said, almost wonderingly: ‘By Jove, Peter. You could be right.’

Ahead, Dekker had slowed to a stop and now van Effen did also. Two boats were moored alongside a canal bank, both about eleven or twelve metres in length, with two cabins and an open poop deck. The two policemen joined Dekker aboard his boat: Bakkeren boarded his own which lay immediately ahead. Dekker said: ‘Well, gentlemen, what do you want to check first?’

De Graaf said: ‘How long have you had this boat?’

‘Six years.’

‘In that case, I don’t think Lieutenant van Effen or I will bother to check anything. After six years, you must know every corner, every nook and cranny on this boat. So we’d be grateful if you’d do the checking. Just tell us if there is anything here, even the tiniest thing, that shouldn’t be here: or anything that’s missing that should be here. You might, first, be so good as to ask your brother-in-law to do the same aboard his boat.’

Some twenty minutes later the brothers-in-law were able to state definitely that nothing had been left behind and that, in both cases, only two things had been taken: beer from the fridges and diesel from the tanks. Neither Dekker nor Bakkeren could say definitely how many cans of beer had been taken, they didn’t count such things: but both were adamant that each fuel tank was down by at least twenty litres.

‘Twenty litres each?’ van Effen said. ‘Well, they wouldn’t have used two litres to get from here to the airport canal bank and back. So they used the engine for some other purpose. Can you open the engine hatch and let me have a torch?’

Van Effen’s check of the engine-room battery was cursory, seconds only, but sufficient. He said: ‘Do either of you two gentlemen ever use crocodile clips when using or charging your batteries – you know, those spring-loaded grips with the serrated teeth? No? Well, someone was using them last night. You can see the indentations on the terminals. They had the batteries in your two boats connected up, in parallel or series, it wouldn’t have mattered, they’d have been using a transformer, and ran your engines to keep the batteries charged. Hence the missing forty litres.’